Angry Brigade Britain

THE ANGRY BRIGADE 1967-1984

One of the main criticisms of the Angry Brigade was — and still is — that
their actions unleashed a wave of repression against the Left in Britain. But the fact that
until then the Left had been left relatively undisturbed does not mean that repression
did not exist, and is not being enforced every moment of the day in every sphere of
proletarian life. Whether this repression uses its instruments of war (police, rubber
bullets, lead bulets, tanks, etc) depends on the level the struggle is at beyond the
official instruments of defence (trade unions, parties), and which in reality are part of
the ‘kid glove’ side of repression along with the media and the church. However small,
however insignificant it may seem, any action which disregards the rules, which does
not seek a mediator, which excludes the logic of dialogue, is a potential danger to the
status quo, not only of the State and the capitalists, but also of the official workers’
movement.

In this framework the Angry Brigade emerge not as a deviation but as a
concrete alternative proposition in response to the intensification of the class struggle
at the time. Not only their communiques but the actions themselves were in the logic of
revolutionary counter-information, reaching out beyond official channels to underline
the institutional violence of the system, and to show that institutions are made of men.
Men are vulnerable and can be attacked — one particularly painful area of attack is
their property, and that is where the Angry Brigade chose to strike.

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Wakefield.

.One London-based ATS officer is reported to have said that it

was unlikely that the Angry Brigade had reformed,.... it is not pos¬
sible for the Angry Brigade to ‘re-form’. It wasn’t an organisation,
nor was it a single grouping—but an expression of the anger and
contempt many people up and down the country had for the State
and its institutions. In this sense the Angry Brigade is with us all the
time (the man or the woman sitting next to you?) — it neither ap¬
pears or disappears (or re-forms) but is the natural manifestation
of revolt when that revolt is directed at the heart of all that causes
suffering: the State.

Black Flag, Vol VI I No 2, Feb 1983.

1984

ANGRY WORDS

We decided to plant the explosives on the electricity pylon
north of Maltby in order to damage the pylon, disrupt the Supergrid
link from the Midlands to the North East, and to show that the
system is vulnerable.

We see the State employing here the techniques of repression
developed and practised against the people of Ireland. But we too
have learnt lessons from the Irish struggle.

As we move towards open CLASS WAR, you will not find us
unprepared!

VICTORY TO THE HIT SQUADS. Teeside Humberside, join
the ANGRY SIDE.

ANGRY BRIGADES
RESISTANCE MOVEMENT
IRSM

1983

Communique sent to the Conservative Party :

GETTING ANGRIER!

WE PLANTED the small bombs in your northern headquarters at
Manchester and Leeds as a reminder to you of the active resistance
which exists in this country.

We have had enough of you ruining our lives. You commit the
worst forms of violence in our society and you don’t care. We are
thrown out of work, abused by the DHSS and the police, deported
and exploited—and still it’s not enough for you. Every day we are
subjected to greater repression; police powers are increased, more
racist laws introduced, 20 years of gains by women are eroded in
three, the organised labour movement is under attack, and now
we see a policy of summary execution.

You thinkyou can crush us, but you’re wrong. We will not remain
silent in the face of this onslaught-we are fighting back. So far our
actions have been aimed at property and not people, but our pa¬
tience is wearing thin.

WE ARE GETTING CLOSER.

ANGRY BRIGADES
RESISTANCE MOVEMENT

1983

‘Overcrowding in the prisons, general repression and the
murder of Barry Prosser earlier this year by screws in Winson
Green Prison are some of the reasons given by a group calling itself
the ‘Angry Brigade Resistance Movement’, for the bomb attack
on property belonging to the Prison Officers Training College in

CONTENTS

Introduction

7

Communiques

19

Notes

32

Chronology

34

The Struggle Continues...

53

Communiques

54

expertise, personnel and access to information sources. The more
recent actions of Action Directe indicate the strategy and tactics
we should employ. As before, there will be no ‘mindless terror’,
no deaths, no hijackings, no hostage-taking of innocent bystanders.
We have nothing in common with the tactics or policies of the Red
Army Faction, Red Brigades, PLO or any other authoritarian group
committed to a struggle for power or control of the State at the
expense of the man and woman in the street. The social revolution
will not be built on the corpses of the old rulers or their functionar¬
ies; it can only be built by people taking control of their own lives,
asserting their independence, their rejection of the State, of power
politics, of authoritarian lifestyles and the competitive values of
consumerism forced on us from birth to death.

In fighting these evils we also have positive aspirations. We wish
for a self-managed society as the only possible basis on which we
can build a more just, equitable and libertarian world for ourselves
and our children. The increased power of the State, the aggressive
confrontation policies of the Thatcher government, the breakdown
of free collective bargaining and consensus in everyday life, the
ever-increasing estrangement of people from the decisionmaking
processes, etc, indicate only one course of action. We must reject
and resist this inexorable erosion of our humanity and hopes with
whatever means are available to us.

WE KNOW WHAT WE ARE GOING TO DO ABOUT IT—
DO YOU?

THE ANGRY BRIGADE II
(IRSM)

is unlikely to improve without a reversal of their policies. This, in
turn, is going to lead to largescale social unrest. There are no work¬
able economic remedies available to them within the monetarist
ideology with which they are obsessed. Unemployment will rise
steeply, inflation will worsen, more factories and businesses will
close down or go bankrupt, apathy and tension will pervade social
relationships, the trade union leadership will be unable to restrain
the rank-and-file. People will get angrier and more frustrated, and
stronger and more desperate forms of control will have to be im¬
posed as the system starts to fail, go hopelessly out of control, and
finally collapse altogether.

WHY NOW AND NOT BEFORE? The late sixties and seventies
saw a similar period of strident anti-working class hysteria and
legislation which led up to the infamous and unsuccessful attempt
to control organised labour through the Industrial Relations Bill.
This led to the downfall of the Heath government. Having failed to
break the labour movement through the courts, the Tories have
now turned to a more oblique approach: a deliberate policy of mass
unemployment! No doubt the Thatcher clique will be strengthened
in their resolve with the election of Reagan, and begin to intensify
their policies with each concession made to them.

WE ARE NO VANGUARD, nor do we claim to lead or represent
anyone other than ourselves in our resistance to the arrogance of
the present government and the misery, frustration and despair
created by its selfish and inhuman policies. It is simply that we as
individuals are approaching the limits of our tolerance. We see our¬
selves as an expression of the anger, resistance and hope created
by the impending failure of this rapidly polarising society.

IN THE PAST TEN YEARS we have operated mainly in France, Italy,
Spain, Germany and North America, and have acquired new skills.

INTRODUCTION

The eight libertarian militants on trial in the Old Bailey in 1972
who were chosen by the British State to be the ‘conspirators’ of the
Angry Brigade, found themselves facing not only the class enemy
with all its instruments of repression, but also the obtuseness and
incomprehension—when not condemnation—of the organised
left.

Described as ‘mad’, ‘terrorists’, ‘adventurists’, or at best au¬
thors of ‘gestures of a worrying desperation’, the Angry Brigade
were condemned without any attempt to analyse their actions or
to understand what they signified in the general context of the class
struggle in course. The means used to justify this were simple: by
defining the actions of the Angry Brigade as ‘terrorist’, and equat¬
ing this with ‘individualist’, the movement organisations—whose
tendency is to see the relationship between individual and mass as
something in contrast—neatly excluded them from their concerns.
Strangely enough this attitude was not limited to the broad left but
was also prevalent within the anarchist movement, where still today
there is a tendency to ignore the role of the individual within the
mass, and the role of the specific group within the mass movement.
When the question is raised, it is usually in the form of absolute con¬
demnation. For example, in an article entitled ‘Terrorism’ [sic] we
read: ‘If a few people take it upon themselves to engage in ‘Armed
Struggle’, this spells out for us, besides the usual public hostility,
police harassment, arrests and defence campaigns, the loss of all
our political lessons, gains and strengths’.(Class War)

7

The problems encountered by the comrades of the Angry
Brigade were similar to those of other groups active at the time
who had refused the limits of struggle delineated by the State—the
so-called limits of legality, beyond which the repressive mechanism is
unleashed—and taken as their points of reference the level of mass
struggle. This decision was in defiance of the State’s definition of the
struggle’s confines. It also defied the limits imposed by the official
workers’ movement and the extra-parliamentary organisations,
including the anarchist movement. The Symbionese Liberation Army
in the US, the RAF in Germany, the first of the Red Brigades in Italy,
were all isolated by the ‘revolutionary’ organisations, condemned
as agitators, provocateurs, individualist terrorists threatening the
growth of the mass movement.

On the attitude to the SLA, Martin Sostre was to write in
America: The denunciation of the SLA by the movement press is
indistinguishable from that of the ruling class. Each left organisation
seems to be competing with the others for their legitimacy by de¬
nouncing the SLA... Conspicuously absent from the denunciations is
any discussion of the role of armed struggle. Revolutionary violence
is seen as something repulsive that should be shunned. The left
movement press would have one believe that to overthrow the
criminal ruling class we have merely to organise mass movements,
demonstrations of protest and repeat revolutionary slogans.’

One such paper in this country—the Trotskyist Red Mole—dis¬
tinguished itself by calling for solidarity with the comrades accused
in the Angry Brigade trial, with the following reservation—‘It is no
use the organised left criticizing the politics of the Angry Brigade
unless we also recognise why a lot of potentially very good com¬
rades reject the various Leninist organisations, and indeed resort
to bomb-throwing—until you are caught—by itself an easy option
that does not deal with the problem of helping to change the politi-

8

1981

THE BRIGADE IS GETTING ANGRY—AGAIN!

ALMOST TEN YEARS have passed since the political situation in
the UK called for the type of direct action as practised by the Angry
Brigade. The wheel has turned full circle and we are obliged, once
again, to prepare to defend ourselves against the provocations of a
virulently anti-working class State and its multinational manipulators,
such as the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg Group and the
Trilateral Commission.

SINCE THE THATCHER GOVERNMENT came to power, we have
seen a rapid increase in the power of the repressive organs of the
State, with a correspondingly obsessive and paranoid emphasis on
perfecting its machinery for ‘countersubversion.’ and ‘law and or¬
der’, political euphemisms for the control and elimination of all real,
potential, and imaginary dissidents. The increased expenditure on
police, prisons and army, the constant surveillance of trade unionists,
harassment of investigative journalists, whistleblowers, environmen¬
tal, ecological and community activists, the extended deployment of
the SAS in Northern Ireland with their assassinations of outspoken
socialists such as Miriam Daly and probably Noel Little and Ronnie
Bunting, the overt terrorising and intimidation of anyone remotely
connected with the struggle in Northern Ireland, the emphasis on
population control in police training and the increased number of
armed police patrolling the streets of Britain, the new picket laws,
etc; all these things indicate that the consensus in British politics is
rapidly becoming a thing of the past.

THE GROWTH IN STATE SECURITY is necessitated by the po¬
litical and economic policies of the Thatcher government and its
supporters. They know only too well that the economic situation

57

* * *

Following the trial Commander Bond was promoted to Deputy As¬
sistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard, Det. Chief Superintendent
Habershon was made Commander and seconded to the Home Of¬
fice’s Research and Planning Office in 1973. In June 1974 he headed
the police investigation into the killing of Kevin Gateley, the Warwick
University student, in Red Lion Square on June 5th 1974—as a result
of which the police were absolved of all responsibility. In April 1975
Commander Habershon was appointed head of the Bomb Squad,
replacing Robert Huntley.

THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES...

The situation today is very different to that of the late sixties and
early seventies. New comrades are taking up the struggle, which has
spread to that of attacks on NATO installations and nuclear power
stations as well as other manifestations of the increasing militarism
in Europe and the US and Canada. There are no structures today
that correspond to the old RAF, Action Directe, the Red Brigades
as they once were, or other forms of fairly structured armed groups.
The signatures and emblems are still used, but the comrades us¬
ing them have hardly any direct relationship with others doing the
same. What is apparent is that there is a will to act against the new
and old forms of repression and in doing so, to also criticise the
old forms of organisation. It is in this light that we see the following
Communiques that have appeared in this country over the past
three years. Another opening towards armed struggle appears on
the horizon. It finds its roots in the mass illegality of the present, and
seeks to go further in terms of creating a new specific revolutionary
armed attack. It is time to take a positon and to act.

56

cal understanding of millions of people.’ Understandable enough in
view of the Leninist program. But from the anarchist perspective?
We read on the front page of a fairly recent issue of Freedom, ‘Even
the bombing campaign carried out by the Angry Brigade which was
technically brilliant., achieved absolutely nothing because, in direct
contradiction with their spoken ideals, they were trying to act as
an elite vanguard leaving ordinary people as passive spectators of
their actions. Far from this resulting in an ‘awakening of the masses’
it resulted in a fear of anarchism and anarchist ideas which has sig¬
nificantly contributed to our current impotence.’

As we can see, the old preoccupation persists: that of protecting
the movement (especially the anarchist one) from the ‘adventur¬
ists’.

In fact the movement of the exploited is not and never has
been one monolithic mass all acting together with the same level
of awareness. The struggle against capital has from the beginning
been characterised by a dichotomy between the official workers’
movement on the one hand, with its various organisations—par¬
ties, unions, etc. channelling dissent into a manageable form of
quantitative mediation with the bosses. And on the other hand, the
often less visible movement of ‘uncontrollables’ who emerge from
time to time in explicit organisational forms, but who often remain
anonymous, responding at individual level by sabotage, expropria¬
tion, attacks on property, etc., in the irrecuperable logic of insur¬
rection. There is no distinct or fixed dividing line between the two
movements. They often affect each other, the surge from the base
obliging the big official organisations to take a certain direction, or
the inverse, where the latter put a brake an autonomous struggles.
Many of those who make up the mass of union membership are
also extremely active in extra-union (and by definition extra-legal)
forms of struggle. Each side, however, has its own heritage: on the

9

one a heritage of deals and sellouts, the great victories that are real
defeats on the workers’ backs; on the other, a heritage of direct
action, riots, organised insurrections or individual actions which all
together form part of the future society we all desire, and without
which it would be nothing but a utopian dream.

A brief look at the development of the struggle in this country
shows this duality quite clearly. The organised anticapitalist move¬
ment as we know it today began to take shape at the beginning of the
nineteenth century. Unlike the other European capitalist countries
developing at the same time, there was only a minor communist
influence both at organisational and ideological level. Traditional
British anti-intellectualism and ‘common sense’ were perhaps fun¬
damental to a more pragmatic form of organisation which took the
form of trades unions. These unions were from the start reformist,
although at times, through pressure from the base, some knew
insurrectional moments. The changes the unions proposed were
however usually intended to come about using nonviolent methods
within the constitutional limits. The most numerically significant of
the early worker’s movements was the Chartist one, which began
around 1838. Recognised as the first modern mass movement,
the first Chartist petition had one and a quarter million signatures.
This is clearly not a qualitative assessment of active adherents. Even
this movement was marked by two opposing currents: on the one
hand those preaching nonviolence and the constitutional road to
universal suffrage as a solution; on the other, those who spoke of
(and carried out) rebellion and armed direct action. These were the
so-called ‘moral force’ and the ‘physical force’, They were linked
to the division between the tradesmen and unskilled workers and
were never reconciled, possibly accounting for the short duration
of the movement.

During and immediately preceding this period there also existed

10

Industrial Relations Act, Fair Rents Act, Miss World contest, etc.
Their scientific ‘experts’tried to pin 25 of the bombings that took
place in England between 1968 and 1971 on to these people, claim¬
ing that these bombings were ‘associated’—disregarding other
similar bombings and covering up the differences between the 25.
But the explosions were claimed by groups as different as the 1st of
May group, the Angry Brigade, The Wild Bunch and Butch Cassidy
and the Sundance Kid. And the ‘set’ didn’t include 3 claimed by the
Angry Brigade AFTER Amhurst Road was raided.

Now the defence is beginning, the truth can come out: the only
conspiracy there’s been is a STATE CONSPIRACY.

* * *

Police explosives expert testifies that between March 1968 and
August 1971 there had been 123 known attacks on property.
NOVEMBER 24: During his summing up Mr Justice James directed
the jury to ignore the defence’s protestations that it was a political
trial. He said: ‘it is not (a political trial) and I direct you to have none
of it. Political trials are trials of people for their political views. We
do not have them in this country.’

DECEMBER 6: The trial ends. Jim Greenfield, Anna Mendleson,
Hilary Creek and John Barker are sentenced to 10 years for ‘con¬
spiracy to cause explosions’. The other four charged are acquitted,
and the sentence of Jake Prescott is reduced to 10 years.
DECEMBER 7: After the Angry Brigade sentences the previous
day, Scotland Yard names two more people they want in connec¬
tion with the bombings: Gerry Osner and Sarah Poulikakou, both
living abroad at the time. 300 people march in protest to Holloway
Prison.

In all, 12 people were arrested and charged—2 had the charges
against them withdrawn, 5 were acquitted, five were convicted and
imprisoned for conspiracy.

55

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

The Press have reported nothing of all this—just as they never
reported the bombings until it suited them. What are they scared
of?

WHAT CONSPIRACY?

The only concrete evidence is the guns and gelignite ‘found’ by the
police in the flat where four of the defendants lived. At first the
police said that 2 of the 4 were there throughout the raid; then
they admitted that at one point they were taken out of the flat then
brought back. WHY? The fingerprint expert admitted that there
were no prints on the guns and explosives. WHY NOT?

The prosecution’s story changed from day to day. It emerged that
the police would have fallen flat over the guns and gelly as they came
into the flat if it had been where they said it was, instead of ‘finding’
it ten minutes later; so they suddenly ‘remembered’ for the first
time—a year later—that it had been covered with cloth.

POLICE CONSPIRACY

One detective was forced to admit that he had altered his notebook
during the trial. Another gave the game away altogether when he
said that he and a colleague sat down in the kitchen and ‘decided’
what happened in the raid.

NO CONSPIRACY

The rest of the evidence against the eight is research, letters, and
articles written by the defendants for different underground papers
( Frendz, Strike ) and broadsheets. The prosecution call them proof
of conspiracy because they mention such political targets as the

54

forms of autonomous revolt, such as that of the many artisans in
the textile industry who, under threat of losing their jobs or of being
reduced to non-specialized labourers, organised in armed groups.
The most significant of these insurrectional movements was that
known as Luddism, which took place between 1810 and 1820.
During this period an immense amount of property was destroyed,
including vast numbers of textile frames redesigned to produce
inferior, shoddy goods. The Luddites, taking the name of Ned Ludd
who had taken a sledge hammer to the frames at hand, organised
themselves locally and even federally with great coordination, and
in spite of vast deployments of soldiers, especially in West Riding
and Yorkshire where the movement was strongest, generalised
insurrection was approached on more than one occasion. As John
Zerzan points out, this was not the despairing outburst of work¬
ers having no other outlet, as a long tradition of unionism was in
existence among textile workers and others prior to and during
the Luddite uprisings.

In the early 1830’s it was the turn of agricultural workers to
become casual labourers to organise in the ‘army’ of Captain Swing,
a mythical figure adopted as a symbol of the farm workers who
burned ricks and barns, threatening their oppressors—farmers,
vicars, Justices of the peace alike—with the same fate. Where the
Luddites were extremely organised, the Swing men lacked secrecy.
Nineteen of them were hanged (sixteen for arson) 644 jailed, and
481 deported to Australia.

Along with the inevitable development in the forces of repres¬
sion in the form of police and army, we see the development of the
unions as an attempt to instill order from within the work situation
itself. By their division by trades, and by specialised and non-special-
ised workers, they had the effect not only of controlling but also of
fragmenting the struggle and diffusing it along these artificial divisions.

By 1910 there were over 50 unions in the engineering industry alone.
The revolutionary movement that subsequently developed began
partly as a destruction of the old forms of organisation.

Three important movements developed. The evolutionary
syndicalist movement under the French influence; the industrial syn¬
dicalists (IWW) from America and the shop stewards movement,
which was particularly active in the Clydeside in Scotland. They
struggled for the control of industry by the workers and against the
failure of the orthodox trade unions and left parliamentarianism to
get any improvement in working conditions. But these movements,
although strong at local level, and capable of organizing important
strikes and revolts, never went beyond the limits of the engineering
and transport industries and the mines.

The war years saw a pact between the trade unions and the
government. Both combined to forcibly instill a sense of patriotism
in the workers to prepare them for the great massacre that was to
come. Strikes became illegal as a result of this deal, showing clearly
how the borderline between legality and illegality is a malleable
instrument in the hands of power. Not all went willingly to the
slaughter and the many deserters and mutinies which were savagely
put down are still part of the proletariat’s unwritten history.

The Communist Party, formed in 1920 during the post war
depression, was authoritarian and centralised. Although the party
never gained the support that its continental counterparts did, it
nevertheless carried out its role of policing the struggles in course.
For example it entered the struggles of the unemployed who were
organised in local groups expropriating food, squatting, etc., and
channelled them into making reformist demands on the State and
large demonstrations such as the Jarrow hunger marches.

12

tenced to a total of 81 years as a result of an expropriation carried
out against the Bank of Scotland in June, 1971. The comrades, who
defended their actions politically in court, were dealt the highest
sentences ever by a Scottish court for robbery: William McPherson,
26 years, Matt Lygate, 25 years, and Ian Doran were virtually ignored
by the revolutionary left.

MARCH 30: Bomb containing I 3 sticks of gelignite planted on
railway line near Stranraer, Glasgow, used by the Army to transport
men and equipment to ferry for N. Ireland.

APRIL 6: Second bomb (13 sticks) planted on rail link near Glas¬
gow.

APRIL 24: Homemade bomb planted at police headquarters at
Sleaford, Lancs. 15 year old boy held.

APRIL 26: Bomb blast and fire at Tory HQ, Billericay, Essex.
MAY I : Explosion at CS gas factory.

MAY 30: Trial of‘Stoke Newington Eight’ accused of conspiracy
to cause Angry Brigade bombings, begins in No I Court at the Old
Bailey in London. This was to be the longest trial in the history of
the British legal system.

Excerpt from a Stoke Newington Eight Defence
Bulletin:

THE TRIAL SO FAR...

Has been four months of prosecution, four months of police wit¬
ness after police witness contradicting each other, changing their
story, LYING, broken only for four weeks when the judge had his
holiday...

53

Purdie found not guilty on all charges. Jake Precott found not guilty
of specific bombings, but guilty of conspiracy to cause bombings
on the basis of having written three envelopes, and was sentenced
to fifteen years.

DECEMBER 15: Jordanian Ambassador, London, machine-
gunned in his car.

DECEMBER 18: Kate McLean arrested and charged along with
Angela Weir, Chris Allen and Pauline Conroy, who had been ar¬
rested during the course of November, of having conspired with the
six people already arrested on conspiracy charges. Shortly before
the opening of Committal proceedings against the ten militants, At¬
torney General, Sir Peter Rawlinson, the victim of one of the Angry
Brigade attacks, decided there was insufficient evidence for a case
to be made against Pauline Conroy and Chris Allen, and they were
released from custody.

1972

JANUARY 22: Explosive letter sent to MP at House of Com¬
mons.

FEBRUARY I: Rhodesia House in London firebombed.
FEBRUARY 3: Kirkgate, Huddersfield, Army Recruiting Office
destroyed by firebombs.

FEBRUARY I 7: Bonhill Street Social Security Office, London,
firebombed. Liverpool Army HQ, Edge Lane, bombed. Severe
damage.

FEBRUARY 22: Aldershot Paras HQ bombed—7 killed.
MARCH 10: South African Airways, London, firebombed.
MARCH I 5: (Approx) Prison officer shot outside Wandsworth
Prison.

MARCH 20: Two shots fired through the front of the Army Re¬
cruiting Office, Slough, Bucks.

MARCH: Four members of the Workers’ Party of Scotland sen-

52

The General Strike was emblematic of the contrast between
the mass of workers and the unions and parties who claimed to
represent them.

However, with the recovery and development of heavy indus¬
try, the main energies of the exploited were concentrated at the
workplace, the only place they now found themselves together.
The shop stewards’ movement was revived in the fifties and sixties
in the so-called boom years. But, although nearer to the base of
the workers, it broke up the area of struggle even further than the
already single trades orientated unions. The growing division of
labour caused increasing divisions in struggle, with the result that
solidarity between the various sectors was limited, even between
workers in the same factory.

While the unions were working to develop industry along with
the bosses, the base were developing different, uncontrollable forms
of struggle such as go-slows, wildcat strikes, sit-ins, etc. For exam¬
ple, of the 421 strikes in the docks at the beginning of the sixties,
410 were unofficial. These same workers had already experienced
troops being moved into the docks by a Labour government, and
TGWU officials giving evidence against their own members ten
years before.

Acceleration in automation, work pace, and alienation, espe¬
cially in the fast developing car industry, created struggles which went
against the union/ management work ethic. Against bargaining and
negotiation, car workers and dockers in particular were carrying
out sabotage on the assembly lines, wildcat strikes and occupations.
At times they succeeded in pushing their ‘defence’ organisations
into situations of attack and across the frontiers of sectoralism and
trades differences into which they had been conscripted. But the
economism of the unions was one of capital’s strongest arms. At a
time when industrial riots and even insurrections were spreading all

13

over Europe, each starting from a minority with its own objectives
and spreading to other categories of workers in the same industry,
then beyond, using pickets, workers’ committees, assemblies, etc.,
the unions were the only organs capable of negotiating with the
management and getting workers to return to work under great
slogans of unity.

This dualism in the workers’ movement between elements
of the base struggling directly and spontaneously within a precise
economic situation, and the representatives of the national politics
of the official workers’ movement always ready to put a brake on
and formalise struggles (e.g. boycotts, strikes and even ‘working to
rule’), turning them into instruments of negotiation with the indus¬
tries, has always existed. But not all the actions of the base can be
instrumentalised and the thrust towards illegality can never be fully
stifled. At times it might seem so. But even during the relative ‘lulls’,
there exists a perpetual movement of absenteeists, expropriators,
and saboteurs. This movement from below, which emerged in force
at the end of the sixties, dispelled the myth of the passive, stable
English working class, just as the image of the traditional worker
changed with the increase in the number of women and immigrant
workers in productive work and the rapidly expanding service
industries.

At the same time a new movement was growing in the schools
and colleges. One of the main points of reference for this movement
was the Vietnam war. In every college and university various groups
were struggling for political space. For a period there was an attempt
to form a unified students movement, the Revolutionary Students
Federation. The most significant groups were of a Trotskyite ten¬
dency, Maoism having had little influence in this country. But the
sterile politics of the straight left (Trotskyites and other Leninists)
could not contain the new anti-authoritarian movement that was

14

SEPTEMBER 16: Bomb discovered in officers’ mess inside Dart¬
moor prison. (News not released for two weeks).
SEPTEMBER 20: Support of Chelsea Bridge opposite army bar¬
racks bombed. (Blast heard three miles away).

SEPTEMBER 24: Despite the fact that the police claim to have ar¬
rested all the Angry Brigade, the Albany Street Army Barracks (near
the Bomb Squad HQ) is bombed by the Angry Brigade in protest
against the actions of the British Army in Northern Ireland.
OCTOBER I 5: Maryhill Barracks Army HQ, Glasgow, fire-
bombed.

OCTOBER 20: Home of Bryant, Birmingham building boss,
bombed while his workers are on strike. Communique issued by
the Angry Brigade.

OCTOBER 30: Post Office Tower in London is bombed by the
Angry Brigade.

OCTOBER 30: The Cunning Man’ Pub, Reading, which refused
to serve workers from the M4 site, bombed.

NOVEMBER I: Army Tank HQ in Everton Street, London,
bombed by the Angry Brigade.

NOVEMBER 6: Amsterdam: attack against Lloyds Bank; Basle: Ital¬
ian Consulate attacked; Rome: British Embassy attacked; Barcelona:
British Embassy attacked. All in support of the ‘Stoke Newington
Eight’ and the Italian anarchists imprisoned on trumped-up charges
of ‘conspiracy’ and subversion.

NOVEMBER 11: Haverstock Street, Islington, raided. Angie Weir
arrested, taken to Albany Street and charged with conspiracy to
cause explosions.

NOVEMBER 17: 89 Talbot Road raided: Chris Allen ends up
similarly charged.

NOVEMBER 26: Pauline Conroy arrested in her flat in Powis
Square and charged.

NOVEMBER 29: Broadstairs Courthouse firebombed.
DECEMBER I: Trial of Ian Purdie and Jake Prescott ends. Ian

51

while visiting the house. One hour later Chris Bott is also arrested
at the same place. Both are taken to join the others at Albany
Street Police Station. Incriminating evidence in the form of two
detonators is planted by police officers in Christie’s car. Both men
are also verballed.

AUGUST 23: All are charged at Albany Street Police Station
with:

• Conspiring to cause explosions between January I st ,

1968 and August 2 I st , 1971.

• Possessing explosive substances for an unlawful
purpose.

• Possessing a pistol without a firearms certificate.

• Possessing eight rounds of ammunition without a
firearms

certificate.

• Possessing two machine guns without the authority
of the Secretary of State.

• Possessing 36 rounds of ammunition without a firearms
certificate.

• Jim: attempting to cause an explosion in May 1970.

• Anna and Jim: attempting to cause an explosion in
Manchester, October 1970.

• Stuart: possessing one round of ammunition without a
firearms certificate. (This was dated back 2 years when
a bullet was taken from his flat. No charges were
preferred against him at the time.)

• John, Jim and Stuart: possessing explosive substances.

• Jim, John and Hilary: receiving stolen vehicle.

• Stuart: possessing explosive substances. (The two
detonators were planted by the police). All are refused
bail and remanded in custody to await trial.

AUGUST 29: Military wing of Edinburgh Castle bombed.
SEPTEMBER 10: Ipswich Courthouse bombed.

50

beginning to develop.

The politics of everyday life—organising around one’s own
oppression, trying to overcome the division between workers and
students, between men and women, forming groups around pre¬
cise problems as opposed to under political banners—was in full
development. A vast movement of claimants, squatters, feminists,
etc., emerged expressing not the Right to Work but the Refusal
of Work, not employing the waiting tactics of unionist education
but taking, Here and Now what was being refused, and refusing
what was being offered. A critique of the nuclear family as a firm
bastion of capitalist power led to many experiences of communal
living. This movement in all its complexity, not so much a students
movement, but a widespread one comprising of young workers,
students and unemployed, could be called the libertarian movement
of the time.

This movement was comprised of autonomous groups acting
outside the stagnant atmosphere of the traditional anarchist move¬
ment with its own microscopic power centres which, as Bakunin
so astutely pointed out, are just as nefarious as any other power
structure. A parallel can therefore be drawn between the dichotomy
within the workers movement, and that which exists within the
anarchist movement. On the one hand there are the comrades
who hold positions of power, not carrying out any precise activity
to contribute to the revolutionary consciousness of the mass, but
who spend their time presiding over meetings and conferences
aimed at influencing younger comrades through the incantation
of abstract principles. These principles are upheld as the only true
tenets of anarchism, and are adhered to by those who, either by
laziness or weakness, accept them acritically. The manifestations of
these islands of power usually take the form of publications that are
long standing and repetitive. They have the external semblance of

15

an ‘open forum’ for the use of the movement as a whole, but the
basic ideology—that of conservation and stasis—is filtered through
from behind the flurry of‘helpers’ carrying out the task of ‘filling’ and
physically producing the publication. These publications are the first
to condemn autonomous actions that take their points of reference
from the illegal movement of the exploited. They are the first to
denounce them, accusing them of bringing police repression down
on the anarchist movement. In their reveries they have forgotten
that repression always exists, and that only in its most sophisticated
form creates the peaceful graveyard of acquiescence, where only
ghosts are allowed to tread. Many of the most forceful of recent
social rebellions have been fired and spread by the popular response
to police repression.

The traditional anarchist movement finds itself threatened
therefore by the other movement of anarchists, the autonomous
groups and individuals who base their actions on a critical ap¬
praisal of past methods and up to date theory and analysis They
too use the traditional instruments of leaflets, newspapers and
other publications, but use them as tools of revolutionary critique
and information, trying always to go towards the mass struggle
and contribute to it personally and methodologically. It is quite
coherent—and necessary if they are to be active participants in the
struggle—that they also apply the instruments of direct action and
armed struggle. These groups refuse the logic of the power centre
and ‘voluntary helpers’. Each individual is responsible for his or her
action which is based on decisions reached through the endless
task of acquiring information and understanding. Some of this can
also be gained from older or more experienced comrades in the
group, but never as something to be revered and passed down
acritically. Just as there are no immovable boundaries between the
two workers’ movements, nor are there within the two anarchist
movements. Nor is there a fixed boundary between the latter

16

JULY 3 I : Despite close police protection in the home of the Sec¬
retary for Trade and Industry, John Davies, it is badly damaged by a
powerful explosion in London. This action followed close on Davies’
announcement of his intention to close Upper Clyde Shipbuilders,
throwing thousands of men out of work. This is accompanied by
the I Ith Comunique from the Angry Brigade.

AUGUST 2: Two houses in Essex searched with explosives war¬
rant. Judge Argyll of the OZ trial is threatened in his Midlands home.
The trial date for Jake Prescott and Ian Purdie is set for September
7, and now the police’s concern is to do everything possible to
wreck and intimidate any support action that might be planned for
them. Various houses are raided and material and addresses related
to the Jan and Jake defence is seized. One of the places raided was
the Agitprop collective in Bethnal Green, London, where material
was seized.

AUGUST I 5: More raids: Hungerford Road, Dave Garfmkel taken
for questioning. Beresford Terrace, N5—documents seized. Crystal
Palace—Sally Keith’s house, floorboards ripped up.

AUGUST I 5: Following the announcement by the British Govern¬
ment that internment was to be introduced in Ireland, there was a
powerful explosion at the Army recruiting centre in Holloway Road,
North London. This was accompanied by a Communique signed
‘Angry Brigade Moonlighters Cell’.

AUGUST 16: Agitprop, Bethnal Green again raided with explo¬
sives warrant.

AUGUST I 7: Wilson and Habershon raid house in Talbot Road,
Notting Hill, with warrant for stolen goods.

AUGUST 21 : House in Amhurst Road, London, raided by Special
Branch and CID. Jim Greenfield, Anna Mendelson.John Barker and
Hilary Creek are arrested. The four are taken to the ‘Bomb Squad’
HQ in Albany Street, London, where the two men are subjected to
a brutal beating-up to extract a confession from them.
AUGUST 21 : Stuart Christie arrested at Amhurst Road, London,

49

and the Marius Jacob group against British Rail, Rolls Royce and
Rover offices in Paris.

MAY: Harris Gleckman, Alan Barlow, and Smith raided for the
second time at Agitprop, Muswell Hill.

JUNE I: A letter is sent to The Times: ‘If Heath and Rippon con¬
trive to enter the Common Market without seeking the opinion
of the British people they will be on the receiving end of a bullet.
This is no idle threat. Signed: The Angry Brigade.’

JUNE 19: Factory at Dordan damaged by several fires started by
incendiary devices.

JUNE 22: During a dispute between Ford management and the
militant shop steward John Dillon, in the Ford Liverpool plant, the
Angry Brigade blow up the home of Ford’s managing director, Wil¬
liam Batty, in Essex. The same night a bomb damages a transformer
at the Dagenham plant of the Ford Motor Company.

BY THIS TIME Scotland Yard is hopping mad. Sir John Waldron
holds a conference there, where senior police officers are told of the
order that has come from the Prime Minister via Horne Secretary
Maudling, that The Angry Brigade must be found and smashed’...
‘We have been ordered to treat the Angry Brigade as Public Enemy
Number One. This is a top priority job.’ In the words of the Sunday
Telegraph: ‘YARD WILL GET THE ANGRY BRIGADE .... A special
team of 20 hand-picked detectives from the Flying Squad and Special
Branch, working with army bomb disposal experts and Home Office
scientists. Their leader, a commander whose name is being kept
secret for his own safety... is known as rough and ready... The squad
is taking a tough line. It will raid hippy communes, question avowed
members of the ‘underground’ and build up a complete file on the
subculture that threatens the present social order.’

JULY 25: intimidation of a claimant in North London when police
with explosives warrant smash door in.

JULY 26: Ian Purdie refused bail of £17,500 by Melford Steven¬
son

48

movement and the insurrectionalist workers’ movement. When
the struggle heightens these movements come close together and
intermingle, the anarchists however always with the aim of pushing
the struggle to a revolutionary conclusion and offering libertarian
methods to prevent its being taken over by authoritarian structures.
The other, traditional anarchist movement has shown all too often
in the past its willingness to form alliances with structures of the
official workers’ movement.

Given the situation at the end of the sixties and beginning of
the seventies, with its wave of industrial unrest at the level of the
base, the students’ struggles in the universities, the struggles of the
unemployed, women and so on, the Angry Brigade emerge both as
a product of this reality, and as revolutionary subjects acting within
it. To reject them as some form of social deviance is to close one’s
eyes to the reality of the struggle at that time. The fact that their
actions deliberately took place in the field of illegality, soliciting
others to do the same, does not in way disqualify them from what
was in its very essence an illegal movement. It is possible to see
this even in the context of the bombings alone that took place in
these years (although by doing so we do not intend to reduce the
vast and varied instruments of illegality to that of the bomb): Major
Yallop, head of the Laboratories at Woolwich Arsenal, main witness
for the prosecution in the trial of the supposed Angry Brigade, was
forced to admit that in addition to the 25 bombings between 1968
and mid 1971 attributed to them, another 1,075 had come through
his laboratory.

Looking at the bombings claimed by the Angry Brigade, we see
that they focus on two areas of struggle that were highly sensitive
at the time. The first was the struggle in industry: the bombing of
the Dept, of Employment and Productivity on the day of a large
demonstration against the Industrial Relations Bill; the bombing

17

of Carr’s house on the day of an even larger demonstration; the
bombing of William Batty’s home during a Ford strike at Dagenham;
the bombing of John Davies’, Minister of Trade and Industry, during
the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders crisis; the bombing of Bryant’s home
during a strike at one of his building works. To complement these
attacks, there were the bombs aimed directly at the repressive ap¬
paratus of the State at a time when repression was increasing heavily
in response to the upsurge in all areas of struggle. The bombing of
the home of Commissioner Waldron, head of Scotland Yard. The
bombing of the police computer at Tintagel House; the home of
Attorney General Peter Rawlinson, and, finally, that of a Territorial
Army Recruitment centre just after internment was introduced in
Northern Ireland fall into this category. The bombing of the high
street boutique, Biba’s and that of the BBC van the night before the
Miss World contest was an attempt to push further in the direc¬
tion of destroying the stereotyping and alienation of the spectacle
of consumerism and role playing ‘Sit in the drugstore, look distant,
empty, bored, drinking some tasteless coffee? or perhaps BLOW
IT UP OR BURN IT DOWN.’

By their actions the Angry Brigade also became a part of that
spectacle, but a part that took form in order to contribute to its
destruction. Their actions as presented here find a place therefore
not as some old commodity to be taken out and dusted, then put
back on the shelf like a relic that belongs to the past. The work
they carried out—and which five libertarians paid for in heavy
prison sentences—is a contribution to the ongoing struggle which
is changing form as the strategies of capital change in order for it
to restructure and preserve itself. A critical evaluation of the Angry
Brigade must therefore, take place elsewhere than on the sterile
pages of this pamphlet. It must take place in the active considerations
of a movement that has a task to fulfil, and that does not take heed
of the condemnation and defamation by those whose ultimate aim

18

feels there is enough evidence against the two of them for a trial to
be set at the Old Bailey. There is no doubt that he will find so, but
nevertheless proceedings proceed ...interminably...until May 27.
Jake had been presented (April 15) with three more charges: having
conspired with Ian to cause explosions ‘with others’ between July
1970 and March 1971 and having actually caused the Miss World
and DEP bombings.

APRIL 22: Arson at Whitechapel Barclays Bank.

APRIL 23: Booby trap incendiary envelope posted to MP at House
of Commons.

APRIL 24: Second police raid in Wivenhoe, Essex. Charges:
possession of drugs—shown photos of Jim Greenfield and Anna
Mendelson and 2 others.

APRIL 26: 3rd raid on Cannock Street. Chris arrested on cheques
charges.

APRIL 28: The Times receives a liquid bomb through the post.
It had a message: ‘From the Vengeance Squad, the Angry Brigade,
The People’s Army. We will use these. Many of them in June and
July. Revolution now.’

APRIL 29: Sabotage at Nuclear Power Station, Berkeley, Glouces¬
ter (3rd such incident within three months).

APRIL/MAY: The IS printers had an intimidating visit, asking about
women’s newspaper. Raids on IS members in London.

MAY I : Mayday, a bomb explodes in the Biba boutique in trendy
Kensington. It was accompanied by Communique 8.

MAY 4: Bomb found strapped to the underside of Lady Beaver-
brook’s car. Inquiries range through Kent, Essex and Oxfordshire.
MAY 4: Four home-made bombs found near the Sidcup and Chisle-
hurst Grammar School, where Prime Minister Heath received the
Freedom of Bexley on Friday.

MAY 22: Bomb attack on Scotland Yard Computer Room at
Tintagel House, London. This is accompanied by simultaneous at¬
tacks by the Angry Brigade, the International Solidarity Movement

47

MARCH 18: During a major strike of Ford workers in England
the main offices of the Ford Motor Company at Gants Hill, Ilford
on the outskirts of London, is wrecked by a powerful explosion.
A thousand word Communique (Communique no 7) is delivered
shortly after.

- A man walks into a London bank, and demands £5,000 with the
threat of a bomb that he had with him (a biscuit tin full of coal).
The bomb at Fords sparks off another wave of raids.

MARCH 20: House in Notting Hill raided. Defence documents
seized.

MARCH 23: Grosvenor Avenue raided for the second time. Dogs
and ten pigs.

MARCH 24: Two houses in East London raided. First, Ron Bailey’s
with explosives warrant. Impression of typewriter taken. Second,
Digger Walsh’s with explosives warrant, by Cremer and Bentley.
APRIL I : Two houses in Notting Hill raided. More defence files
for the Powis Square trial are seized.

Throughout the period since their arrest, Ian and Jake have
been kept in solitary in Brixton Prison, allowed out for only one
hour each day. Their defence lawyers can only gain access to them
after bargaining with Habershon. When the defence counsel asks
for evidence of arrests to be produced, he is told this can’t be
done without the permission of the Attorney General. In addition
£ 10,000 bail for each of the defendents is refused by the magistrate
at Barnet.

APRIL I: The home of the headmaster of Roydale School is
firebombed.

APRIL 5: Arson attempt at Gosport Tory Club. (Evening Standard
says ‘this is the latest in a series of incidents involving this club in
the last six months.’)

APRIL 5: Bomb left in Leicester Square.

APRIL 22: Committal proceedings for Jake and Ian start at Barnet
Court. The committal is to decide whether or not the magistrate

46

is to protect themselves.

Many problems are raised by a rereading of the actions and
experiences of the Angry Brigade- clandestinity or not, symbolic
action or direct attack, anonymous actions or the use of Commu¬
niques to be transmitted by the media— to name but a few. The
pages that follow help to highlight these questions, whose solution
will only be found in the concrete field of the struggle.

Jean Weir

19

COMMUNIQUES

BROTHERS & SISTERS:

We expect the news of the machine-gunning of the Spanish
Embassy in London 1 on Thursday night to be suppressed by the
bourgeois Press. It’s the third time over the last month that the
system has dropped the mask of the so-called ‘freedom of informa¬
tion’ and tried to hide the fact of its vulnerability.

‘They’ know the truth behind the BBC 2 the day before the
Miss World farce, ‘they’ know the truth behind the destruction of
property of High Court judges; ‘they’ know the truth behind the
four Barclays Banks which were either burned or badly destroyed;
‘they’ also know that active opposition to their system is spread¬
ing.

The Angry Brigade doesn’t claim responsibility for everything.
We can make ourselves heard in one way or another. We machine-
gunned the Spanish Embassy last night in solidarity with our Basque
brothers and sisters. We were careful not to hit the pigs guarding
the building as representatives of British capital in fascist Spain. If
Britain cooperates with France over this ‘legal’ lynching by shutting
the truth away, we will take more careful aim next time.

SOLIDARITY & REVOLUTION
LOVE

Communique, The Angry Brigade 3

20

Scotland Yard for assault (of those dragged away from Bow Street)
and for wrongful arrest and imprisonment. The Special Branch were
present at the Miss World trial.

FEBRUARY I 3: Searches at the homes of Hilary Creek, John
Barker, Kate McLean, Chris Allen and others in a hunt for explo¬
sives. Jake Prescott is charged with conspiracy to cause explosions
between July 30 1970 and December 1971, and with the specific
bombings of Carr’s home, the Dept of Employment and the Miss
World contest.

FEBRUARY I 5: Cannock Street is raided again.

FEBRUARY 19: Habershon goes to Edinburgh. Two houses are
raided and Jane and Chris Allen are questioned. The same day
The Times prints Communique 6 from the Angry Brigade. There
was also a telephone call from an Angry Brigade spokesman to
the Havering Recorder in Essex, saying that from Saturday next a
campaign of violence would be conducted against Conservative
Party policies in South Africa.

The raids continue...

FEBRUARY 20: Mike Kane’s house is raided.

MARCH 5: House in Talbot Road, Notting Hill raided.
MARCH 6: 12 midnight, house in Tyneham Road, SWI I, raided,
Ian Purdie was there and was arrested. Habershon said at Barnet
that ‘the raid was to find explosives and Ian Purdie. They are syn¬
onymous as far as I am concerned.’ He admitted in court that he
had ordered Ian to be arrested for questioning, which is illegal.
MARCH 7: Ian Purdie is charged, along with Jake Prescott, accused
of the two Angry Brigade bombings They are both in the top security
wing at Brixton Prison—as class A prisoners—and are kept in their
cells for 23 hours a day.

MARCH 10: The Guardian reports on police excesses in their
investigations.

45

refuses them access to a lawyer who was present outside the sta¬
tion. The papers start to talk of a Scottish anarchist.

Two men are seized by police in London and taken to Barnet
for questioning concerning ‘about 30 unpublicised attacks on Estab¬
lishment property’ including banks, the home of Tory racist Duncan
Sandys and various Conservative Party offices.

JANUARY 29: The Evening News reports that: ‘...in the latest
report of HM Inspector of Explosives, there was again a substantial
increase in the number of cases involving homemade devices. There
is evidence of the increasing use of such devices in the furtherance
of political activities’.

JANUARY 30: Slough Conservative Office firebombed.
FEBRUARY 3: Jake Prescott is released on bail and yet is ar¬
rested on the I Ith. He is interrogated, denied access to a lawyer
for three days, and is accused of the attacks on Carr’s home and
the BBC van.

FEBRUARY 9: The Jersey home of a local managing director
firebombed.

FEBRUARY 11 : The house in Grosvenor Avenue, Islington, where
Jake Prescott had been staying, is raided by the police. The house
is searched for explosives. Diaries, address books, newspapers
and other articles are taken away, despite protests that this does
not come into the terms of the police warrants. Press reports now
make Grosvenor Avenue the centre of the conspiracy. The nearest
thing they can find...

FEBRUARY I I: Earlier in the day Habershon and his gang had
disrupted the trial of the people who were involved in the dem¬
onstration at the Miss World contest in November 1970. They
removed by force four of the defence witnesses who were due
to give evidence in the trial. They were taken off to Barnet, where
they were questioned and denied all access to legal representation.
Habershon comes forth in true democratic light when he says ‘I
am not concerned with legal niceties’. Charges are brought against

44

Fascism & oppression
will be smashed

Embassies (Spanish Embassy machine-gunned Thursday)

High Pigs

Spectacles

Judges

Property

Communique I
The Angry Brigade

* * *

Success
Min. E. & Prod.

Communique 2
The Angry Brigade 4

* * *

(Only extracts of Communique 3 are available from I.T. 94 and
I.T. 95)

The statement claims the bombing of the Department of Em¬
ployment and Productivity Wages Council Office. They described
it as part of ‘a planned series of attacks on capitalist and govern¬
ment property’. It ends ‘we will answer their force with our class
violence’. 5

Robert Carr got it tonight.

We’re getting closer. 6

Communique 4
The Angry Brigade

21

We are no mercenaries.

We attack property not people.

Carr, Rawlinson 7 , Waldron 8 , would all be dead if we had
wished.

Fascists and government agents are the only ones who attack
the public—the fire-bombing of the West Indian party in South
London, the West End cinema bomb. 9 British democracy is based on
more blood, terror, and exploitation than any empire in history.

Has a brutal police force whose crimes against people the media
will not report.

Now its government has declared vicious class war.

Carr’s Industrial Relations Bill aims to make it a one-sided

war.

We have started to fight back and the war will be won by the
organised working class, with bombs.

Communique 5
The Angry Brigade

* * *

FELLOW REVOLUTIONARIES...

We have sat quietly and suffered the violence of the system
for too long. We are being attacked daily. Violence does not only
exist in the army, the police and the prisons. It exists in the shoddy
alienating culture pushed out by TV, films and magazines, it exists
in the ugly sterility of urban life. It exists in the daily exploitation of
our Labour, which gives big Bosses the power to control our lives
and run the system for their own ends.

How many Rolls Royce...

How many Northern Irelands...

How many anti-Trade Union bills will it take to demonstrate

22

officials are becoming increasingly embarrassed and annoyed by the
activities of the Angry Brigade, who cannot now be dismissed as a
group of cranks. Some senior officers credit the group with a degree
of professional skill that has seldom been experienced’.

In the weeks after the Carr bombing, the Barnet Brigade,
headed by Roy Habershon (explosives expert), Commander Bond
and Commander Dace, thundered all over London with squad cars,
dogs, photographers, raiding houses of‘known left wing extremists’.
Their concern (as was clear from the number of address books,
magazines, letters, etc that they took) was to draw up a picture of
the extraparliamentary left, whose activities they were now forced
to take seriously, and whose structures they were more or less
ignorant of. These were raids of the political police in action.
The raids included:

J ANUARY 13: Chris Reed, Huddleston Road, London, N7
JANUARY 14: Stuart Roche, Schools Union activist.

JANUARY 15: Ian Purdie’s brother, Robert is taken up to Barnet
and questioned. The police are looking for Ian.

JANUARY I 7: The house of Ann Lamche (Cinema Action) is raided.
Two people are taken off for questioning. The Agitprop house in
Muswell Hill (which the police were eager to look round) address
book copied.

JANUARY 19:4 known raids in which nothing is found. Joe Keith
and Tony Swash questioned by Habershon.

JANUARY 20: Ian Purdie questioned by Palmer-Hall at Bedford
Gardens.

JANUARY 21: Paul Lewis of International Times is questioned by
Habershon. Office and home searched.

JANUARY 22: Chris Allen is questioned by Edinburgh CID. Haber¬
shon goes to Edinburgh for three days.

JANUARY 23: Another raid in Edinburgh.

JANUARY24: Police raid a house in London and two men, Ross Flett
and Phil Carver, are dragged off to Barnet for questioning. Barnet

43

particularly a victim of this. The London evening newspapers were
trumpeting from day to day about the ‘young Scottish anarchist
recently returned from Spain’ whom they had branded as the most
likely... people were disappearing off the streets for questioning.

The police visit offices of leading newspapers and take pho¬
tographers off to Barnet to identify people from the photos that
were taken outside Carr’s house on the night of the January 12
bombing.

On February 3 Jake Prescott was released on bail. Ian Purdie
was in court at the time, as he had been for Jake’s previous remands.
Then, on February I I, Jake and a Dutch friend were seized from
a pub in North London and dragged off to Barnet. They were re¬
fused any access to lawyers for two days. Jake was interrogated by
Habershon and Allard for hours. On February 12 Jake’s defence
counsel began preparations for a writ of habeas corpus on the police,
which would require them to either charge Jake or release him. On
February 13 Jan Oudenaarden, the Dutchman, was released after
‘the most frightening experience of my life’. Jake however was not
released. He was charged with causing an explosion at Carr’s home
and those at the DEP and the Miss World contest.

Jake and Jan had been ‘detained for questioning' for 3 days. In
the court at Barnet, Habershon is challenged to produce ‘grounds
for arrest’ and is threatened with legal action. It is claimed that he
had tried to persuade Jake to change his lawyer - presumably to
one who would not cause trouble for the police...

JANUARY 25: Home of the Lord Provost of Glasgow bombed.
JANUARY 27: Communique 5 received by the Press Association.
The police were forced to admit that earlier bombings (which they
had covered up) had taken place. The police, however, imposed
a press blackout on the course of the investigations. At the same
time the Daily Mirror offers a £10,000 reward to anybody giving
information leading to a conviction.

JANUARY 29: The Times reports: ‘Scotland Yard and security

42

that in a crisis of capitalism the ruling class can only react by attack¬
ing the people politically?

But the system will never collapse or capitulate by itself. More
and more workers now realise this and are transforming union
consciousness into offensive political militancy. In one week, one
million workers were on strike... Fords, Post Office, BEA, oil de¬
livery workers...

Our role is to deepen the political contradictions at every level.
We will not achieve this by concentrating on ‘issues’ or by using
watered down socialist platitudes.

In Northern Ireland the British army and its minions has found
a practising range: the CS gas and bullets in Belfast will be in Derby
and Dagenham tomorrow.

OUR attack is violent... Our violence is organised.

The question is not whether the revolution will be violent.
Organised militant struggle and organised terrorism go side by side.
These are the tactics of the revolutionary class movement. Where
two or three revolutionaries use organised violence to attack the
class system ... there is the Angry Brigade. Revolutionaries all over
England are already using the name to publicise their attacks on the
system.

No revolution was ever won without violence.

Just as the structures and programmes of a new revolutionary
society must be incorporated into every organised base at every
point in the struggle, so must organised violence accompany every
point of the struggle until, armed, the revolutionary working class
overthrows the capitalist system.

Communique 6
The Angry Brigade

* * *

23

COMRADES!

Two months ago we blew up Carr’s house. Revolutionary
violence through the high walls of English liberalism.

Apart from a short Communique we remained silent since
...Why?... who is the Angry Brigade ...what are its political objectives
... a lot of criticism was directed toward vague directions ... they
called us the Special Branch, the Front, Anarcho-nuts, Commies,
Bomb-mob, the lot ... we believe that the time has come for an
honest dialogue ... with any comrade who cares to address us ...
through the Underground Press ...through anything. Look around
you brother and sister ...look at the barriers ...don’t breathe ...don’t
love, don’t strike, don’t make trouble ...DON’T.

The politicians, the leaders, the rich, the big bosses, are in com¬
mand ... THEY control. WE, THE PEOPLE, SUFFER... THEY have
tried to make us mere functions of a production process. THEY
have polluted the world with chemical waste from their factories.
THEY shoved garbage from their media down our throats. THEY
made us absurd sexual caricatures, all of us, men and women. THEY
killed, napalmed, burned us into soap, mutilated us, raped us.

It’s gone on for centuries.

Slowly we started understanding the BIG CON. We saw that
they had defined ‘our possibilities’. They said: You can demonstrate
... between police lines. You can have sex... in the normal position
and as a commodity; commodities are good. You can rally in defence
of the TUC ... The ‘leadership’ is wise.

THEY used confusing words like ‘public’ or the ‘National Inter¬
est’. Is the Public some kind of ‘Dignified Body’ which we belong to,
only until we go on strike? Why are we reduced then to dreaded
scroungers, ruining the country’s economy? Is ‘National interest’
anything more than THEIR interest?

Lately we started seeing through another kind of con: there is a
certain kind of professional who claims to represent us... the MPs,

24

In the week after the Carr bomb a police guard was provided
for Justice Melford Stevenson after he had received a phone call
saying that a bomb was to be placed at his house. This was Melford
the hanging judge who was to sentence Jake Prescott to 15 years.

Secret orders have been issued to police and security guards
that members of the organisation must be flushed out as a matter
of top priority. An undercover squad of Special Branch officers has
been formed to pursue full-time investigation into the group.

Full-time guards have been placed on Cabinet Ministers. These
are angry times... Peter Walker (Environment Minister), Melford
Stevenson, Tory MP Hugh Fraser, Tory Prime Minister Heath and
many others have received threatening calls. A Communique sent
to the Express newspaper says: THE ANGRY BRIGADE IS AFTER
HEATH NOW. WE’RE GETTING CLOSER’.

JANUARY 18: Glasgow South African Airways office fire-
bombed.

JANUARY 19: Jake Prescott was arrested an a cheque charge
in Notting Hill. On January 20 he appeared in Marylebone Court,
where he was questioned by Habershon. In the time he was inside
on remand, he was put in cells with Messrs A, B and C. Habershon
had an interview with Mr A at Camberwell Court, which he took
up again on February 9. Mr A made a statement that Jake ‘had ad¬
mitted the bombings at the DEP, Carr’s home and the Miss World
Contest’... Very convenient! But unfortunately for Habershon, the
jury at Jake’s trial were not prepared to believe the police witness
(perhaps they had in mind the £ 10,000 reward that had been of¬
fered by the Daily Mirror for police informants) ...This part of the
police evidence was rejected as a frame-up.

At this time the police were being given full rein to do what they
liked. In the midst of the hysteria that was generated by the idea that
the opposition might be armed, in the midst of the fear that came
after a cabinet minister had his front door blown off, a manhunt
was taking place ‘leaving no stone unturned’. Stuart Christie was

41

but also brought a witness who vouched that Jake was in fact in
Edinburgh at the time. They were forced to drop this charge.
DECEMBER 3: Spanish Embassy in London machine-gunned
following international protests against the trial of the Basque na¬
tionalists, the Burgos Six. This was not reported.

DECEMBER 8: Big demonstrations against the Tory Govern¬
ment’s Industrial Relations Bill. In the early hours of December
9 the Department of Employment and Productivity in St James
Square, London, is bombed. The police had searched the building
and no sooner left it than it went off. Action claimed by the Angry
Brigade.

1971

JANUARY I 2: Thousands of people strike and march against
the Industrial Relations Bill. The home of Robert Carr, Minister of
Employment, in Hadley Green Road, Barnet, is bombed. First explo¬
sion is at 10.05pm, the second at 10.20pm. The action is claimed
by the Angry Brigade.

‘One man the police particularly want...is a Scot in his twen¬
ties who is suspected of being involved in the bomb attack at the
Iberia Airlines office in London last August. This man was believed
to be in Paris yesterday.’ The Times

The hunt for Stuart Christie as a likely ‘candidate for outrage’
was on. His history as an anarchist and his involvement with the
movement in Spain made him a superb candidate for a fit-up.

Police searches extend over the whole of the London area.
A number of people were dragged up to Barnet Police Station for
questioning. ‘Special Branch were watching members of a group
believed to be connected with the explosions’. All those questioned
at Barnet in the early part of the week were released, apart from
a man and a woman who were handed over to the police in other
parts of London in connection with other offences.

40

the Communist Party, the Union leaders, the Social Workers, the
old-old left... All these people have presumed to act on our behalf.
All these people have certain things in common ...THEY always
sell us out... THEY are all afraid of us... THEY’LL preach towards
keeping the peace ... and we are bored ... poor ... and very tired
of keeping the peace.

THE ANGRY BRIGADE BECAME A REALITY we knew that
every moment of badly paid boredom in a production line was a
violent crime. We had rejected all the senile hierarchies and ALL
the structures, the liars, the poverty pimps, the Carrs, the Jacksons 10
the Rawlinsons, the Bob Hopes 11 , the Waldrons...

To believe that OUR struggle could be restricted to the channels
provided to us by the pigs, WAS THE GREATEST CON. And we
started hitting them.

January 12 was important... we shattered the blackouts of the
yellow Press... hundreds of years of imperialism... millions of victims
of colonisation were breaking up... all the suppressed frustration,
all the glow of unleashed energy was blowing our minds... Carr was
totally unimportant... he was just a symbol... we could have killed
the bastard ... or Powell or Davies 12 ... or any pig.

Then we were scared... like any newly born baby opening our
eyes to a gigantic glow—we got frightened... every knock, every
word became a menace... but simultaneously we realised that our
panic was minute compared to the panic of the Mirrors and the
Habershons AND IT FLASHED: WE WERE INVINCIBLE... because
we were everybody.

THEY COULD NOT JAIL US FOR WE DID NOT EXIST We
started daring out into the open, talking to friends, to neighbours,
to people in the pubs, in football games ... and we knew we were
not alone...WE WERE ALIVE, AND GROWING!

25

COMRADES!

Brothers and sisters we hardly know have been picked up,
framed, intimidated, harassed. The McCarthy’s l3 the Prescotts, the
Purdies 14 are all INNOCENT. The pigs need scapegoats.

Our Power is the 6 Conservative Offices petrol-bombed on
January 13, the Altringham generator which was blown out are all
answers of the Revolutionary movement to our call.

We are certain that every single day that these comrades stay
behind bars will be avenged ... Even if it means that some of the
Pigs will lose their lives.

Three weeks ago we nearly blew up Jackson’s headquarters.
We knew he had to sell out. We wanted to hit him BEFORE he did
the damage. But inside us we carry the remnants of liberalism and
irrationality ... burdens of our past we have tried to shed. He beat
us to it... HE SOLD OUT ... Let the working brothers and sisters
be our jury.

This time we knew better: it’s FORD TONIGHT. We are
celebrating the hundred years of the Paris Commune. We are
celebrating our REVOLUTION which won’t be controlled.

Our revolution is autonomous rank and file action—we cre¬
ate it OURSELVES. We have confidence now ... we don’t have to
wait for them to dangle something tempting like a Powell, a Bill, or
a bad apple in front of our faces, before we jump like rabbits. We
don’t clutch desperately at the illusion of FREEDOM. Our strategy
is clear: How can we smash the system? How can the people take
Power?

We must ATTACK, we cannot delegate our desire to take
the offensive. Sabotage is a reality... getting out of the factory is not
the only way to strike... stay in and take over. We are against any
external structure, whether it’s called Carr, Jackson, IS, CP, or SLL
is irrelevant—they’re all one and the same.

WE BELIEVE IN THE AUTONOMOUS WORKING CLASS.

26

AUGUST 30: The London home of the Commissioner of the
Metropolitan Police, Sir John Waldron, is damaged by a bomb blast.
The bombing is not reported in the national press.
SEPTEMBER 8: The London home of Attorney General, Sir Peter
Rawlinson, in Chelsea, is bombed. Again this goes unreported.
SEPTEMBER 17: Jake Prescott paroled from Albany Prison, Isle
of Wight.

SEPTEMBER 21: Wimbledon Conservative Association fire-
bombed.

SEPTEMBER 26: Hampstead Conservative Association fire-
bombed.

SEPTEMBER 26: Bomb exploded outside Barclays Bank, Hea¬
throw.

SEPTEMBER 26: Simultaneous bomb attacks against Iberia in
Geneva, Frankfurt, Paris and London airports.

OCTOBER 7: BOAC Air terminal at Victoria, booby trap hand
grenade found.

OCTOBER 8: Second explosion at Rawlinson’s home.
OCTOBER 9: Italian Trade Centre, Exhibition Building, Cork
Street, London, bombed. Attacks simultaneously in Manchester,
Birmingham and Paris against Italian State buildings. The attacks
were claimed on behalf of Giuseppe Pinelli, the Italian anarchist
murdered by the police in 1969.

OCTOBER 24: During the Council workers’strike a bomb ex¬
plodes in the cleansing dept, head office, Greenford.
OCTOBER 26: Administration building on Keele University
campus firebombed.

OCTOBER 26: Barclays Bank at Stoke Newington firebombed.
Newspaper report says: ‘Police are investigating several similar
incidents at other branches.’

NOVEMBER 20: A BBC van outside the Albert Hall in London
covering the Miss World contest is bombed at 2.30am. The prosecu¬
tion claimed that Jake Prescott was responsible for this explosion,

39

FEBRUARY 10: Ian Purdy is in prison for 9 months for throwing
a petrol bomb at the Ulster office in Saville Row during an Irish Civil
Rights Campaign march.

FEBRUARY 20: Three students captured as they are about to
firebomb Barclays Bank.

FEBRUARY 28: Bomb attack on the Bank of Bilbao and the
Spanish State Railways in Paris.

MARCH 28: Time bomb found at Waterloo Station.

MAY 4: American Embassy, London, firebombed.

MAY 10: Incendiary device discovered aboard Iberian Airliner at
Heathrow. Similar devices are found in other European capitals on
planes belonging to Iberia.

MAY 19: Wembley Conservative Association firebombed.
MAY 22: High explosive device discovered at a new police station
in Paddington. This was later claimed by the prosecution in the trial
of the Stoke Newington Eight to be the first action undertaken by
The Angry Brigade’.

JUNE I 0: Brixton Conservative Association firebombed.

JUNE I I : Stuart Christie’s home raided with explosives war¬
rant.

JUNE I 8: Lambeth Court firebombed.

JUNE 30: Army depot, Kimber Road, London, firebombed.
JUNE 30: Ian Purdie is released from Albany prison, (Isle of
Wight).

JULY 3 : Simultaneous bomb attacks in Paris and London against
Spanish State tourist offices, and the Spanish and Greek Embas¬
sies.

JULY 7: Army recruiting office, South London, firebombed. Army
Officer Training Centre, Holborn, London, firebombed.

JULY 10 : Home of a retired policeman in Stoke Newington
firebombed.

AUGUST 18: The London offices of Iberia Airlines, Spanish State
airline, bombed.

38

WE ARE PART OF IT. AND WE ARE READY TO GIVE OUR
LIVES FOR OUR LIBERATION.

POWER TO THE PEOPLE

Communique 7
The Angry Brigade 15

* * *

‘If you're not busy being born you’re busy buying’. All the sales
girls in the flash boutiques are made to dress the same and have
the same make-up, representing the 1940’s. In fashion as in every¬
thing else, capitalism can only go backwards...they’ve nowhere to
go—they’re dead.

The future is ours.

Life is so boring there is nothing to do except spend all our
wages on the latest skirt or shirt.

Brothers and Sisters, what are your real desires?

Sit in the drugstore, look distant, empty, bored, drinking some
tasteless coffee? Or perhaps BLOW IT UP OR BURN IT DOWN.
The only thing you can do with modern slave-houses—called bou¬
tiques—IS WRECK THEM. You can’t reform profit capitalism and
inhumanity. Just kick it till it breaks.

Revolution.

Communique 8
The Angry Brigade 16

* * *

WE are getting closer.

We are slowly destroying the long tentacles of the oppressive

State machine-

secret files in the universities

27

work study in the factories

the census at home

social security files

computers

TV

Giro

passports
work permits
insurance cards

Bureaucracy and technology used against the people...

To speed up our work

to slow down our minds and actions

to obliterate the truth.

Police computers cannot tell the truth.

They just record our ‘crimes’.

The pig murders go unrecorded.

Stephen McCarthy, Peter Savva 17 , David Owale 18 —The murder of
these brothers is not written on any secret card.

We will avenge our brothers.

If they murder another brother or sister, pig blood will flow in the
streets.

168 explosions last year. Hundreds of threatening calls to govt
bosses, leaders.

The AB is the man or woman sitting next to you They have guns in
their pockets and anger in their minds.

We are getting closer.

Off the system and its property.

Power to the people.

Commmunique 9
The Angry Brigade 19

28

Paris: Chase Manhatten Bank, Bank of America and Transworld
Airlines.

MARCH 25: US Embassy in Madrid bombed.

AUGUST: International Anarchist Conference in Carrara, Italy.
SEPTEMBER 10: Seven young anarchists arrested in Spain, ac¬
cused of conspiring with the I st of May Group and of participation
in actions in the Valencia region. Information leading to their arrest
came from the Special Branch of New Scotland Yard, London.
OCTOBER 15: Imperial War Museum gutted by incendiary
device.

NOVEMBER 4: Department of Internal Affairs in West Berlin is
attacked with molotov cocktails.

1969

FEBRUARY 3: Unexploded dynamite charges discovered on the
premises of the Bank of Bilbao and the Bank of Spain in London.
FEBRUARY 9: Bank of Spain in Liverpool bombed.

MARCH I 5: Two anarchists, Alan Barlow and Phil Carver, arrested
immediately following a powerful explosion at the Bank of Bilbao
in London. In their possession was a letter claiming the action on
behalf of the First of May Group.

AUGUST 16: Home of Duncan Sandys, Tory MP, firebombed.
AUGUST I 7: Ulster office in London firebombed.

AUGUST 19: Bomb explodes after being thrown into army
recruiting office, Brighton.

OCTOBER 9: Petrol bombs found in left luggage locker in Lon¬
don.

1970

JANUARY 28: Bomb attack on offices of the Spanish Cultural
attache in Paris.

37

CHRONOLOGY

1967

AUGUST 21 : Three gunmen in a white saloon car rake the consu¬
lar section of the US Embassy with machine gun fire the preceeding
night. Scattered leaflets call for solidarity with the Vietnamese. The
action is claimed by the First of May Group. Five of their comrades
had been jailed in Spain for trying to kidnap the chief of an American
air base in Spain.

NOVEMBER: Simultaneous bomb attacks against the Greek, Bo¬
livian and Spanish Embassies in Bonn and the Venezuelan Embassy
in Rome. (I st of May Group in solidarity with the Latin American
guerillas and against the fascist regimes in Europe). The same day
a bomb destroyed the entrance to the Spanish Tourist Office
in Milan and the Spanish, Greek and American Embassies in the
Hague, Holland.

1968

JANUARY: Explosive rocket discovered facing the Greek Embassy
in London.

FEBRUARY 27: The Hornsey home of Stuart Christie is raided by
police led by Det. Sqt. Roy Cremer with explosives warrant relating
to Greek Embassy and information received that other attacks were
about to take place in London.

MARCH 3: Six bombs damage the buildings of diplomatic missions
in London, the Hague and Turin. These actions were claimed by
the I st of May Group.

MARCH 6:1 ncendiary bomb with timing mechanism explodes in
the Moabit Criminal Court, West Berlin.

MARCH 18: Plastic bomb attacks damage three US buildings in

36

* * *

JOHN DILLON’S IN; WE WON

BATTY AND HIS TRANSFORMER’S OUT; WE WON

AGAIN

PUT THE BOOT IN
BOGSIDE-CLYDESIDE

SUPPORT THE ANGRY SIDE SPREAD THE WORD
POWER TO THE PEOPLE

Communique 10
The Angry Brigade

* * *

DAVIES IS A LYING BASTARD

He hides the deliberate rundown of heavy industry, the run¬
down of investment in the traditionally depressed areas, that’s never
been much anyway, by saying that the closures at UCS are just the
result of bad management. And the bloody management won’t suffer
anyway. The conditions he’s made for the new company are tough
only for the workers who have to sign once and for all a contract
they can't fight according to the Industrial Relations Bill.

Davies ‘courageously’ says the government won’t support lame
ducks. Yet 2 weeks ago the government put a massive investment
in Harland and Wolff. A political move to keep capitalism going at
any cost in the face of the people’s uprising.

VICTORY TO THE WORKERS ON THE CLYDESIDE

We’d like to say to you to watch out for all the vultures who’ll
be flying to Clydeside to tell you what to do. The same people who
signed the productivity deals that started the redundancy ball rolling
are now trying to feed off your struggle. If there’s going to be an
occupation it’s got to be for real. Take the yards from the bosses

29

and keep them. The Labour Party, the Unions and their minions, the
CP with its productivity craze, the same bastards who always sell us
out will try to fob you off with gestures like one day strikes and one
day occupations, petitions, etc , which will achieve bugger all.
YOU ARE YOUR OWN LEADERS. HAVE YOUR OWN TAC¬
TICS, CONTROL YOUR OWN STRUGGLE—SOLIDARITY
BOGSIDE, CLYDESIDE, JOIN THE ANGRY SIDE

Communique I I
The Angry Brigade

* * *

Over 5,500 refugees, 2,000 homeless, over 20 dead in 2 days,
230 imprisoned without charge or trial, the six occupied counties
of Ireland are terrorised by the gunmen in khaki. This war of terror
is carried out in the name of the British people. THIS IS A SLAN¬
DEROUS LIE. The British Imperialist Campaign in Ireland is waged
only to safeguard the fat profits of a few rich pigs and power crazy
politicians.

We warn all unemployed brothers and sisters.

Do not be fooled by the army recruiting campaign. An army
career isn’t fun in the sun and learning a useful trade, if you join
you’ll be trained in Belfast, Derry and all the other working class
ghettos in Northern Ireland to murder and brutalise ordinary
working class people. The training will come in useful when the
boss class sends the troops into Clydeside, Merseyside, Tyneside,
Birmingham, London and all the working class districts throughout
Britain. To any unemployed worker thinking of joining up we ask
you one question:

—WHICH WAY WILL YOU POINT YOUR GUN WHEN THE

30

(12) John Davies, the Minister of Technology and former director general of
the Confederation of British industry, the supposed opposite of the TUC.
His earlier posts with Anglo-lranian Oil, BP, Shell Mex and the National
Export Development Council helped strengthen the British Empire.

(13) Stephen McCarthy died in January 1971 as a result of a brutal arrest
by two Islington pigs and gross mistreatment by prison medical authorities
in Wormwood Scrubs and Dover Borstal.

(14) Jake Prescott and Ian Purdie were falsely charged by Chief Superintend¬
ent Habershon with having been involved in earlier Angry Brigade actions.
Jake, arrested on February Nth, 1971, and Ian, arrested on March 7th
1971, were in solitary confinement for the Angry Brigades’ actions against
Fords, Biba’s and the police computer.

(15) This Communique was sent on the night of March 13th, 1971.

(16) The Communique is dated May 1st, 1971. The same day a bomb ex¬
ploded in the trendy Biba boutique in Kensington High Street, Chelsea.

(17) Peter Savva was killed in the Holloway Road pig station. London, in
May 1971. The pigs pretended that Peter tripped when drunk: the coroner
reported 'death by misadventure’.

(18) David Owale, a Nigerian, was found dead in a river near Leeds two
years ago. Leeds pigs were charged with ‘unlawfully killing a vagrant Ni¬
gerian immigrant’.

(19) This Communique was sent on May 22nd, 1971, following an explo¬
sion at the police computer, Tintagel House, London, and simultaneous
explosions at three British offices in Paris.

35

NOTES

(1) An unnumbered Communique which seems to be the first. Thursday
night was the night of December 2/3, 1970.

(2) On November 20th, 1970 a bomb was placed under a BBC van. The
van was to be used to aid the BBC in glorifying the super-women of the
Miss World competition.

(3) Communique 3 was sent on December 9th, 1970.

(4) This Communique was preceded by two phone calls to the national
Press. Min. E. & Prod, (Department of Employment and Productivity) was
hit by a bomb explosion the night of December 8th, in the basement of St
James’ Square. The DEP at the time with minister Robert Carr in charge, is
one of the government’s organisations responsible for dangerous working
conditions, unemployment, productivity agreements, and the Industrial
Relations Bill passed by the Tory government.

(5) The Communique was sent on December 9th, 1970.

(6) The Communique was sent on the night of January 12th 1971. The
Carr family, spending a typical evening at home, were shaken by the blast
of the first bomb. Mr Carr, after crawling on the floor to the disconnected
telephone, takes his wife and daughter to a neighbour’s house. Showing his
usual concern for workers’ welfare, he instructs the nanny/housekeeper to
go back into the house alone. Then a second bomb explodes, not hurting
the housekeeper, but knocking three police officers to the ground.

(7) Sir Peter Rawlinson, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, has been
a pig for 43 years in London, Ceylon, Lancashire and Berkshire. A bomb
had exploded at his home on October 30th, 1970.

(8) Sir John Waldron, Heath’s Attorney General, graduated from Christ
College, Cambridge, with a BA, the British Army in North Africa with a
major’s rank and the Inner Temple Bar with a piece of silk (QC). A bomb
had exploded at his home on September 8th, 1970.

(9) A bomb mysteriously exploded last autumn in a car near a West-End
cinema, killing two people.

(10) Tom Jackson, as head of the Union of Post Office Workers, directed
the Post Office strike and then broke the strike with a sell-out pay deal.

(11) Bob Hope, who entertained regularly for US troops in Vietnam, also
played the Big Man Master of Ceremonies at the Miss World competi¬
tion.

34

OFFICERS ORDER YOU AGAINST THE PEOPLE OF YOUR
OWN TOWN?

Who will you shoot when your parents, brothers and sisters
are in sight of your gun?

The British boss class has lined its pockets with the accumulated
profits of 700 years of exploitation of the Irish working people.
Now they are killing to defend these profits.

THE ANGRY BRIGADE ADVISES THE BRITISH RULING
CLASSES TO GET OUT OF IRELAND AND TAKE THEIR PUP¬
PETS (LYNCH, FAULKNER, ETC) WITH THEM.

ANGRY BRIGADE
MOONLIGHTER’S CELL
POINT YOUR GUN

* * *

The Angry Brigade bombing of Chris Bryant’s home in Birming¬
ham has brought attention to the activities of the Bryant building
combine.

For two weeks workers on a Bryant site have been on strike
demanding a flat rate of one pound an hour and the end of ‘the
lump’—a pool of self-employed non-union men available for hire.

The blast badly damaged the front of Bryant’s six bedroomed
house but as with other AB bombings, didn’t hurt anyone.

Capitalism is a vicious circle.

People’s sweat and blood is used and exploited. They make us
produce shit.. they give us next to nothing while their class pockets
huge profits ...the ruling class...the Bryants of this world.

Then, when we put the overalls aside, we clean up the muck
from our faces and we take the boring bus or train home and they
suddenly transform us into consumers. In other words when we
are not working they make us buy... the same shit we produced.

31

The miserable wage packet they gave us they make us spend on
useless food, on machines specially designed to break down and
on houses we know look and feel like prisons.

Prisons we helped build. And paid (more specifically promised
to pay over the next twenty years for we never have enough dough
to pay for a house or a car or anything for that matter—they have
to exploit us even more by making us pay interest) for them. We
build the prisons and then we live in them. We produce shit and
then we eat it.

Producers of shit—consumers of shit.

There are many of our brothers and sisters inside. An old
revolutionary once called prisons ‘an occupational hazard’. A hazard
which may hit any person who chooses to take up action. But to
lose a finger, a limb, your lungs—any accident at work—this too is
an occupational hazard. Look at the safety precautions on Bryant’s
sites—none at all. Not only a limb but your life. So what’s the bloody
difference?

Chris Bryant made £1,714,857 profit last year—a 25 per
cent rise on 1969. He does it by a cocktail of high society, high
finance and a lot of corruption. He has clinched his deals for the
redevelopment of Birmingham on the golf courses of Solihull with
Corporation Councillors. The Councillors oblige by charging high
rents on the Council estates—like Chelmsley Wood—to pay high
prices to Bryant for his contracts. Now he’s buying up land around
Solihull to sell to the same Council who will give him the contracts
to develop it, with our money. No one should be conned that
the Birmingham Mail is anything other than the Bryant broadsheet
either. A man who lives in a mock Tudor village, (‘Windways’,
Jacobean Road, Knowle) doesn’t have to worry about the next HP
instalment, doesn’t have to nick a can of paint from work to make
his house look decent, doesn’t have to worry about draughts. (But
today—did we say Windways?) We hit million for million ...We’ll
follow him from Tudor village to Tudor Village.

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25 years we’ve waited in Birmingham for a building strike.
Bryant hit us and bullied us with the Lump. By hitting Bryant we’re
hitting the lump too. The Woodgate Valley stands for class solidarity
and Revolution. The Workers have taken their stand. Sabotage in
the place of work is a reality. The bosses are beginning to feel the
undiluted power of the people. The people are hitting back.

The Brigade is hitting back.

Now we are too many to know each other.

Yet we recognise all those charged with crimes against property
as our brothers and sisters. The Stoke-Newington 6, the political
prisoners in Northern Ireland are all prisoners of the class war.

We are not in a position to say whether any one person is or
isn’t a member of the Brigade. All we say is: the Brigade is every¬
where.

Without any Central Committee and no hierarchy to classify
our members, we can only know strange faces as friends through
their actions.

We love them, we embrace them as we know others will.
Other cells, sections, groups.

Let ten men and women meet who are resolved on the light¬
ening of violence rather than the long agony of survival; from this
moment despair ends and tactics begin.

Power to the people.

THE BRIGADE IS ANGRY

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